Weekend Kickoff: June 2018
Thirty-two tracks for the first Friday of summer 2018, when the porch reopened and the daylight stretched past nine and the rotation had to commit to the long evening. Built for the friend group’s standing Friday tradition, sequenced for the kind of June night where dinner runs late and nobody quite wants to go inside afterward.
Jack White “Over and Over and Over” opens. The lead single from “Boarding House Reach” had landed in March and the album cycle was at its peak by June. White’s solo catalog can be uneven but the moments when he lands the song are the moments when there’s nothing else in the year that quite measures up — “Over and Over and Over” is one of those, all distorted guitar and propulsive rhythm and a vocal that sounds like the singer’s barely containing himself.
Sir Sly with K.Flay “&Run” — the K.Flay Remix — follows. The original is on the standard catchy-alt edition; this rotation uses the remix because K.Flay’s vocal adds the textural variant that a longer June evening needs. The remix sits the original guitar lower in the mix and lets the vocal carry the song in a way that the album cut doesn’t quite manage.
Portugal. The Man “Live in the Moment” is the singalong anchor. The band’s mainstream breakthrough had happened with “Feel It Still” the previous year and the follow-up singles were the slightly-quieter cuts that the radio kept playing without quite breaking through to the same level. “Live in the Moment” specifically is the one that worked — the chorus is built around a line that I keep singing for half an hour after the song ends, which is the test.
Joywave “Destruction” pivots the rotation toward the moodier back half. The Rochester band has been quietly making excellent records for years and the alt-radio rotation has never quite figured out what to do with them. “Destruction” is built around a percussive bassline that the band’s catalog tends to lean on — the kind of song that sneaks up on you mid-listen.
Sir Sly “High” follows mid-rotation as the second cut from the same band. Two-track placement is the rotation’s small acknowledgment that the band’s album rewards the cumulative listen rather than the single-track sample. “High” specifically is the cut that the standard radio rotation didn’t quite know what to do with — it’s not a hook-and-chorus song, it’s a slow-build, and the back half of the track is where the album as a whole reveals itself.
Nathaniel Rateliff & The Night Sweats “You Worry Me” carries the soul-revival side of the rotation. Rateliff’s first album was the breakthrough; the follow-up landed in 2018 with less fanfare but better songwriting. “You Worry Me” is the cut where the band stops trying to be a soul-revival act and just commits to being a great band with a horn section. The horn arrangement specifically is the thing that makes the track land.
lovelytheband “broken” was the streaming-discovery breakout of the year. The duo’s catalog is uneven but the lead single hit at exactly the right cultural moment, when the alt-pop rotation was hungry for songs about specific kinds of anxiety. Glass Animals “Black Mambo” closes the front-half block — a band whose entire catalog was about to crossover but hadn’t quite yet, and whose presence on the June 2018 rotation predicted the next two years of cultural absorption.
Mid-rotation pulls in some of the year’s other peaks — Twenty One Pilots’ new album cycle was starting, Hozier had just dropped his comeback singles, Childish Gambino’s “This Is America” was still in heavy rotation from its May release. The back half pulls toward the indie-folk side that the long-daylight June evenings reward — slower tempos, finger-picked guitar, the kind of music that fits the eleven-p.m.-porch context.
Thirty-two tracks lands at about two hours. The right length for a Friday-evening rotation in early summer that runs from dinner-prep through the long-daylight post-dinner stretch when the porch is open and the music has to do the work of being the room’s only entertainment. Built for the standing tradition. Listened on the porch with the door open. The friend in the group chat who’d been requesting more alt-rock for months texted me on Sunday morning to say it was the best edition of the year so far. He was probably right.
